Minimally invasive medical techniques often rely on steerable elongate instruments, such as steerable catheters, to conduct procedures. One of the challenges in conducting diagnostic and/or interventional cases with minimally invasive instruments is understanding wherein pertinent medical instrumentation is located and/or oriented related to nearby tissue structures and other instrumentation. Imaging modalities such as radiography, fluoroscopy, and ultrasound may not be ideally suited for understanding the detailed positioning and orientation of instruments in real or near-real time. For example, it is possible to use multiple planes and/or imaging field of view perspectives with modalities such as fluoroscopy to determine the location and orientation of instrumentation that shows up in the images relative to anatomy which also is featured in the images—but multiplanar imaging may not be convenient or accurate enough to facilitate realtime navigation of minimally invasive instruments through various anatomical spaces. Further, it is possible to utilize kinematic models of instruments to understand the positions and orientations of portions of such instruments, but compliance, control mechanism slack, repositioning, and other factors may lead to the desire to recalibrate kinematic-based position and/or orientation models relative to the actual anatomy from time to time. Embodiments are presented herein to address these and other challenges.